UPDATE: Well, apparently someone at Zeitgeist Films (the distributor of the Maddin film) felt this was copyright infringement. (The actual film, with its original soundtrack, which had been up at YouTube, has also been removed.) So you’ll have to go and rent the DVD, and the Stereolab song, and sync them up yourself.

A bit of an experiment here. A month or so ago, I rented a DVD which contained Guy Maddin’s “Heart of the World,” a fabulous short film. Its original soundtrack was by a Soviet composer from the 1940s (if I’m reading the small print correctly), but something about its visual texture made me think it would work well with a Stereolab song as soundtrack. I chose “The Emergency Kisses” primarily because it’s about the right length – and the title resonates with that of the movie.

Even though I didn’t edit the visual at all, and my editing of the music consists solely in looping a bit of the ending to add about 15-20 seconds so the two parts end together, there are some nice moments of synchronicity. The song is essentially in three parts with a coda; the film is basically three acts: the end of the first part of the song coincidentally coincides (!) with the end of the first act. The song’s extended coda sort of slithers into place alongside the credits. And the lyrics, intriguingly, prove to have several metaphoric points of convergence with the film (the link includes both the French lyrics and an English translation). Oh – and to avoid anyone giving anyone the false impression that I’m too clever, I’ll observe that I didn’t think of any of this beforehand: I only discovered it after putting the two bits together.

(Needless to say, my main inspiration here was Pink Floyd’s “soundtrack” work for The Wizard of Oz…)